Remembering Human
by Drer'Ahv
Summary: A young boy appears into a working woman's life and then disappears just as fast, leaving behind more questions and memories than answers. These are her thoughts as she tries to put the pieces together.
1. Chapter 1

Herro, welcome to my first fan fiction in the FFVII world. Just as a slight warning, this series is an on-going daydream I used to toy with when I was having trouble; I never really intended the fan fiction world to see it. HOWEVER, I do love reviews. Please leave one if you read.

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I thought I was pretty good with the impossible, pretty open. Pretty open with people in general. People would ask, I would tell. I had a few of my fears, but I tried to get above them, telling myself, "Eh, it will pass". And sometimes it did and sometimes didn't – sometimes it doesn't. But as much as I was open, just bursting with personal information – innocent in this way – I was cynical. People would talk of life changing experiences; Ha, I say, how much more can they blow things out of proportion? It wasn't a matter of, "Wow, I wonder if I'll have an epiphany like that", it was a matter of "How much did the newspaper pay them to come up with this shit?"

And believe it or not, here I am, without being paid. Unlike others I didn't have a lightning bolt hit my head, an Aha! moment. I didn't notice until it had already happened. And this is what I'm here to tell you about. This is the story where things change.

He had taught me fear. It wasn't the fear of him; it was the fear of everything. I couldn't stop; he was younger than me, not even a fourth of my age, and I had set my impressions of him in stone; here was a boy that needed saving from everything, from himself. He was a sort of drug, a disease; the more I was with him, the more I jumped at open doors, dogs on the streets…still, I saw him as a person to be fixed, a jumble of medical mishaps to be triumphed. The slightest hiccup that sounded strange compared to the other kids, and straight to the medical encyclopedias I went. The smallest quirks that made him human…analyzed, searched, and then finally sorted into either the symptom of mental illness or discarded as junk. Maybe this was what distracted me from the fact that I washed my hands exactly four times before touching any food, or that I started to feel stared at, like I was naked in front of a crowd.

We had no idea how he had ended up here; it wasn't possible. People and things did not just appear in what was supposed to be reality. After a while, it chaffed me. It wasn't possible, so I rejected it. Wouldn't live it. I created so many theories it's hard to remember them all…the overruling one, I remember, was that it was a very long dream. This was also the one that carried the most anxiety. A dream that long, after all, was a dream you couldn't wake up from. I would remove myself from a conversation every now and then to go to a corner and squeeze my eyes shut. This would be the one, I would say, this time I could get myself out of here and into the real world. But no matter how hard I squeezed those brown eyes of mine, I couldn't wake up. My dream wouldn't just let the fuck go. I didn't care who saw me, who heard me; in a dream, do you really care if someone hears you talk to yourself?

Seeing him cry was the worst part. It was usually a nightmare; other times I pushed too much, made him remember too much at once.

Looking back, I was fifty percent of the disease that ailed him. It made me angry that reality could shatter but I couldn't manage to make people happy. I didn't notice that I was the one making him unhappy; I was too busy watching him tap every bookcase five times, wondering why. I didn't notice I was starting to do it right along with him. We both tapped out our own erratic tones, out of beat with each other, each wondering what planet the other came from – after all, only crazy people tap bookcases. But watching him cry, no matter how crazy, was the hardest. I wanted to cry right along with him.

Through this boy I learned how large the world was, how many people there were in it, and what a large, large number of them want to hurt you. I learned that I wasn't as open to people as I thought, not as fearless. Through this boy I learned just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. I learned the meaning of mass hysteria, even though this was a mass of two.

"This boy" was named Sephiroth, or, as his name quickly got shortened down to, Seth.


	2. Chapter 2

The thing that was both morbid and curious about Sephiroth was that he could spiral upwards and downwards emotionally at the same time. While that may be interesting, it was still no fun dealing with the kid when he had the flu.

He had a horrible fear of both death and being ill, so as soon as he had the flu -- and discovered that "the flu" was defined by exactly how many times you vomit up your insides -- he was panicking. Panicking so hard, in fact, that the panic was causing him to vomit even more.

He was vomiting as soon as he got home from school the day before. One minute he was contemplatively eating a poptart, the next he was being introduced to breakfast for a second time. And then he panicked, as if he had never actually had the flu, wasn't sure what was causing the flu, and in the end didn't really care as long as it wasn't an illness.

"Am I --" vomiting. I pull his hair back. "Imma sick?"

I didn't want to lie to him, but I didn't want to have him be pissed at me for lying when he was older, either. I mean, I didn't forgive my parents for lying about Santa Claus for years. "You're vomiting, so yes, yes you are."

Cue the tears. Cue the crying. It wasn't that he simply didn't like being sick; other than the occasional day off, who did? He was just afraid of germs. Any germs, in fact. He was the only child I knew that could go through an entire jar of hand sanitizer in a day; when I was his age I was busy making forts out of mud and then eating ice cream straight after. "I'm not going to die, am I?!"

Cue the panic. He immediately, between the waves of nausea, launched on a long campaign about if he had the flu, then who did he catch it from? That person was going to die too, wasn't he? And if that person was going to die, and if he was going to die, then could I catch it and die too? No room for any interjections; once he started talking, you couldn't stop him. And after a little while he would be so frightened by his own ideas that he would vomit without any help from the mentioned flu.

I would try to calm him down, honest I would; he just didn't want to hear it. For a six year old, a six year old who was spending his day in the bathroom because he was sick, he was extremely stubborn. Try to hug him, he would flinch away. Talking to him was ruled out already. He didn't like any physical contact, period; he nearly had a heart attack when I pulled his hair back.

As I remember, in the game they said "No one ever saw him cry". I can't remember if that was about Sephiroth or Rufus, but if it was the former, it was bullshit. The poor kid was bawling his eyes out because he thought that the flu would kill him. He didn't want to die, he said, and he may not remember where he was before he was here but he remembered that they didn't have the flu there and maybe that was a better place, you know, because if they didn't have the flu then no one died and if no one died then everyone was happy. And maybe there were no germs there either, and if people died even if there was no flu then they sure wouldn't die if there were no germs period. He was much too young and this was all too much and he was going to die wasn't he?

"No," I said.

And this just sent him on a whole other round of crying and vomiting because he was sure that this "No" was just me in denial or lying to him and that he really was going to die and I just wasn't willing to admit it.

Remember that? No matter what you said the boy was always convinced you knew something he didn't. He had serious trust issues, he did. You had to feel sorry for Seth because he could never feel like he was entirely safe, no matter what we did. Always looking over his shoulder and jumping at the slightest noise.

Not only that, but none of the other children at school liked him. Well, even if they did I don't think he would like them; I think Sephiroth thought they were all plotting against him or something. Remember when he would talk about all the things he heard them whispering, and then when we showed up for a day it turned out they were just talking about Pokemon cards or something like that? I think the only other person his age he liked was that Caroline girl. He really liked her, actually. Never was quiet about her. Always talked about her, what she said to him. Said she had really pretty eyes; I remember you saying that they were the color of mud. Turned out that she was the only one conspiring against him in the first place. All in a first grade class, almost funny when you think about it.

And maybe that's why he was so convinced that the flu was going to kill him; maybe he thought one of his classmates purposely gave it to him. Coughed on his pencil box or something until it was guaranteed he'd be puking by midnight. He always had a feeling that he was different; he also always had a feeling that people were going to kill him for it. Explained why he thought the flu was such a sob-worthy event.

Do you remember when we found him? He was all different breeds of messed up, sort of wandering around dazed. Didn't remember his name, or where he came from, or waht he was just about to do. Finally said his name was Seeeph-er-rooth -- pronounced slow now, because he could barely pronounce it himself, sort of reminded me of a off-key violin -- and he only told us after he had made sure that the vehicle indeed was not an elaborate gas chamber on wheels. He probably knew his name in the first place, he just didn't like trusting people with it. Or it was a hassle to pronounce it. Knowing him it was probably the latter; he always hated his name. Said it was because no one else called him by it, no one else liked it, and he really couldn't say it without stumbling over a letter or two. He gave me that weird look he always gives people when I said that he'd learn to pronounce it as he got older. You know the look, the "Bet you five bucks you're lying" look.

He didn't like his hair, either. Said people stared at him because of his hair, and his eyes, not to mention how he looked pale enough to just have slipped out of his own grave. He didn't like it if you complimented how he looked, though. In the court of Sephiroth you are guilty until proven innocent. You were a suspected liar until you had proof that he really did look great that day, ie when he really did get himself some self-esteem.

He didn't seem to have this phobia of germs and death when you first drove him home -- I really didn't think of anything sane to do for him at the time, like call the cops and ask if there was a "MISSING: silver haired kid" poster floating around. No, I took him home, and he didn't sleep for about three days afterward, making it a sort of wonder how you only managed to get a few sentences out of him in that timespan. He was in a bit of shock, you guessed. And then he slept for about six hours, and then woke up and decided the most wonderful thing to do at the time -- it was four in the morning -- was rearrange the cupboards. Alphabetized, of course. I woke up, all groggy, and asked him what he was doing.

"I'm fixing it", was his reply.

"Fixing what?" I asked. He seemed stuck at this; I don't think he was too sure of this himself.

"Fixing it," he said finally, as he put the container labeled "Basil" next to the dried "Chives". Actually, most of the contents weren't what the labels so boldly claimed, but I wasn't about to tell him that. Figured it would cause drama.

He was an enigma from the start, I tell you. Half the time he didn't know what he was doing, but he did it anyways, because, as he so eloquently put a month later, "But it needs to feel right." Evidently basil next to ground pepper felt so wrong to him that he needed to fix it before he could carry on with his life.

And I had a feeling that things "feeling right" was also the reason why fifty percent of the amount of vomit he had dealt with this day was from anxiety and the other half was just the regular flu. Things "feeling right" was probably also why I had to take exactly three sips from the water I gave him before he deemed it safe to drink. Even though I told him that to get over the flu he needed a lot of water he still didn't trust me, or maybe it. As if I would dump hemlock juice into the local water supply just because.

The flu actually subsided by the next day, but the way Seth panicked you would think it lasted the week. He went from his usual routine of washing his hands three times to washing them five times. He would only eat if he watched me eat the same exact thing, to make sure that it wasn't, in fact, laced with some new form of flu. His teacher sent me an email the same week to let me know that Seth had asked to have his desk moved to the farthest end of the room away from the rest of the students, and when she said no, he asked to go to the bathroom and hid there until recess, when he sneaked back into the classroom to move it to the far end anyways. No matter what we said to him he was convinced everyone was now a disease-riddled person that wanted to add him to the hordes of sickly people just for the laughs.

Caroline, Caroline...I remember him come home the same week crying because he had asked her if she missed him while he was out sick, and, in the blunt way girls are at that age, she had replied that No, she didn't. He was all torn up about that. He was really quite the sensitive kid, when you got down to it. He could tear up so easily.

He was human, through and through. Though, like all young boys, he never liked to admit it...it's sort of ironic, that, in the end, what made him snap was the exact opposite problem. Not that it's happened yet.


End file.
